Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
Officials assess 9-1-1 breakdown
Several times in the past few months, residents trying to reach 9-1-1 have been unable to get through. It’s a problem emergency officials are taking very seriously and on Tuesday, Fire and Rescue Chief Kevin McGee outlined the situation for the Board of County Supervisors and the public.The county’s 9-1-1 system is five years old, bordering on ancient for a telecommunications system. On May 28, Verizon workers began a scheduled upgrade of the system and though the work took longer than expected, everything seemed to go as planned and calls were rerouted through a backup system while the work was being completed.
After the upgrades were finished, calls were switched back to the primary system and that’s when the problems started.
At 5:50 p.m., a caller tried to report a fire on Kingston Road in Eastern Prince William but couldn’t get through. Over the next five minutes, many more callers also phoned in but the phones in the Public Safety Communications Center didn’t ring.
McGee said five minutes of silence on a weekday evening would have been “unusual” but not unheard of so officials didn’t notice immediately that there was a problem.
Then at 5:55 p.m., they received “what I would characterize as an absolute avalanche of calls to the call-takers that had been trapped in the equipment,” he said, explaining that all of those missed calls were stuck inside the system and they all came flooding out at once.
Communications workers scrambled to get to them all and call back people who hadn’t been able to get through. Thus it was more than seven minutes from the time the first call was received about the fire until the time fire trucks were actually dispatched.
Verizon officials were alerted to the situation and the cause was determined to be a software problem with the 9-1-1 server. Everything seemed to be okay after that until July 4, when the system went down again for an undetermined amount of time that officials said was likely between two and 15 minutes.
There were a number of missed calls that night, McGee said, mostly involving reports of illegal fireworks. However, one Gainesville man tried three times to get through because a member of his family was having a medical emergency. Unable to reach anyone at the 9-1-1 center in Prince William, he put the family member in the car and drove across the border toward Fauquier Hospital. After crossing the Fauquier County line, he called 9-1-1 again and this time reached the Fauquier emergency workers, who sent an ambulance to meet him.
McGee said the July 4 breakdown is still being investigated but it appears as though a faulty data switch had caused the server to reboot, resulting in the dropped calls.
The bigger problem was that when the system went down, an alarm was sent to the national Verizon center, alerting Verizon workers to the problem. While the call-takers in Prince William didn’t know there was a problem, Verizon officials off-site did, McGee said.
But Verizon employees didn’t notify anyone in Prince William that the system was down. The Verizon center hosts all of the company’s 9-1-1 systems in the country so alarms go off frequently. The company’s policy is that most of these issues resolve themselves quickly, McGee said, adding that policy “is of course, not acceptable to us.”
Catherine Hogan Lewis, Verizon’s director for external affairs in the metro area, said the failure to report the problem to Prince William officials was a mistake.
“I think that in this case there was a misread of the level of alarm coming in,” she said. “In this case, the alarm that came in for Prince William County should have been communicated to the county and it wasn’t.”
But the system went down again on July 10. However, this time, Verizon workers were already at the Prince William call center monitoring the situation. The national Verizon center quickly notified county telecom workers and no calls were missed. That problem, McGee said, was caused by a faulty power supply in the server.
The next night -- July 11 and into the morning of July 12 – the system was plagued by “intermittent” problems. Some cell phone calls about a car crash weren’t received but others were. In all, 16 calls were missed but McGee said there were no delays in emergency services because of the problem.
Verizon workers now believe that the system is stable but the company has contracted with a third party to audit the system to be sure. According to McGee and Lewis, Prince William and Verizon officials are treating the situation as an emergency and are doing everything they can to make sure problems don’t continue.
“We wanted no stone left unturned to resolve the situation,” McGee said.
You must be logged in to post a comment.